Virginia Woolf
From Philosopedia
Woolf, Virginia (Stephen) (25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941)
Woolf, daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, was an innovator whose novels included Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1917), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), the latter being a classic of the feminist movement.
Her love-life has been the subject of much speculation. When five, her half brother Gerald and George Duckworth examined her private parts, according to Quentin Bell, her nephew. Even when she was a teenager, George would come to her bedroom and paw her. Disagreeing with others, Bell insists in Bloomsbury Recalled (1996) that George never raped, just pawed. George, in fact, was said to have been a virgin when he married. Bell’s father, Clive, is said to have flirted with Woolf, two years before Bell was born in 1910. Many speculate as to why Virginia would marry the “penniless Jew” Leonard Woolf, for generally she did not like Jews. But after marrying Woolf, a writer on economics, the two set up Hogarth Press in 1917 and their home became a gathering place for what came to be called the Bloomsbury Group, a large number of whom professed atheism or were rationalists, as was she. Rather than emphasize plot or characterization, Woolf described a character’s consciousness and feelings. She became a leader in utilizing the stream of consciousness method.
Meanwhile, it was Leonard Woolf who asked Bell to write about Virginia, who then divulged her painful secrets. Woolf is known for having had a lesbian affair with Ethel Smyth, to whom she once wrote concerning her intense interest in reading as a means “of transcending the self,” “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”
But her greatest love in life, wrote Martin Greif, was Vita Sackville-West, the wife of Sir Harold Nicolson, a poet who was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Mrs. Sackville-West, she said, made her feel like “a real woman” for the first time, although there is no documentation whatsoever that the two ever had any physical intimacy. Many at the time believed that they did. For her she wrote what some consider is the longest love poem in the English language: "Orlando," in which the main character starts out as a man and becomes a woman. (In a 1993 movie, Orlando starts as a woman and becomes a man.)
A 1995 biography by James King, Virginia Woolf, after telling of her menstrual problems, her attacks of diarrhea, and her sexual frigidity, hypothesizes that Woolf never received the attention from her mother that she so badly wanted and that Sackville-West was thought of as a substitute mother. In a Freudian interpretation, King argues that having been molested as a young girl by her half-brother, Woolf mistrusted men, and that the early deaths of her half-sister, Stella, and her older brother, Thoby, resulted in her being obsessed with the subject of death. King states that Woolf flirted with Clive Bell, her sister Vanessa’s husband, and speculates that she had an incestuous relationship with Vanessa herself.
However, by the time of her last book, Between the Acts (1941), Woolf is said to have felt deeply alienated from Leonard, Vanessa, and Vita, and that the affair with Vita had long since wound down. In a June 1926 letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell asked, “But do you really like going to bed with women?” Woolf responded: “Women alone stir my imagination. . . . Vita (Sackville-West) is now arriving to spend two nights alone with me. . . . I say no more; as you are bored by Vita, bored by love, bored by me, and everything to do with me. . . . Still, the June nights are long and warm; the roses flowering; and the garden full of lust and bees, mingling in the asparagus beds.”
Camille Paglia, for one, discounts any such gossip that Woolf was lesbian.
Her periods of depression have been well documented, by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison in Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993). Shortly before her death, she wrote her husband Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics, on 28 March 1941: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” But, as described by biographer Quentin Bell, she also wrote Leonard, “I feel I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times . . . . Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.” Then, mindful of her previous mental breakdowns in 1895 and 1915, and after finishing Between the Acts (1941), she took her walking stick, crossed the meadows to the River Ouse, put a heavy stone into her coat pocket, walked into the river, and drowned.
Remarked King,
- She carefully chose the time and circumstances of her death, very much in the manner of an artist imposing her will upon life. Her decision was deeply courageous: although she would not be able to write about death, she would actually face the experience itself.
Edward Albee’s three-act 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was not about her but, rather, described a middle-aged professor and his wife who torture each other verbally. This has been said to be Albee’s illustration of our need to “try to claw our way into compassion.” Virginia Woolf experienced that need, also.
“I read the Book of Job last night - I don’t think God comes well out of it,” Woolf wrote in one of her criticisms of organized religion.
(See an article by Queen’s University’s Susan Dick in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (1994); and Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf [1997].)
